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2nd one is the real big blinker, but whatever, I has a new ideer: in Life, is there a way to make a blinker or block (or anything) come out of something? so if it has space in front of it, it will make a blinker there, and if the blinker is destroyed, it is able to make another one in the same spot. idc how big it has to be, as long as it works.

83bismuth38 wrote:2nd one is the real big blinker, but whatever, I has a new ideer: in Life, is there a way to make a blinker or block (or anything) come out of something? so if it has space in front of it, it will make a blinker there, and if the blinker is destroyed, it is able to make another one in the same spot. idc how big it has to be, as long as it works.

83bismuth38 wrote:2nd one is the real big blinker, but whatever, I has a new ideer: in Life, is there a way to make a blinker or block (or anything) come out of something? so if it has space in front of it, it will make a blinker there, and if the blinker is destroyed, it is able to make another one in the same spot. idc how big it has to be, as long as it works.

83bismuth38 wrote:it appears i forgot to mention; if there is already a blinker there, it resets the process, while not destorying the blinker. when the blinker IS destroyed, it makes a new one. idk if it's possible.

Very likely possible, but a lot of bother. Would have to find some kind of glider-producing reaction that's Heisenburp-modified into a plain dying spark by the presence of a blinker. It might be pretty hard if you don't know the phase of the blinker ahead of time, but it could be done with two separate tests 90 degrees from each other.

Anyway, then if a glider comes out of the reaction you use it to trigger a blinker-building circuit -- that part's pretty easy.

Not sure where you would get a Sacred And Must Absolutely Not Be Temporarily Destroyed blinker from, though. For the regular kind of blinker, it's a lot more efficient to use the blinker-keeper reaction to remove it if it's there and then rebuild it. Or if you need to know if it's there or not, just shoot at it with a glider, rebuild the blinker, and then do different things depending on whether the glider made it past the blinker location or not.

The changes involved in adding an extra state are very simple and should be easy to see.

On an unrelated note, what I would really like is some wildcard character for rules so I can indicate that a cell can be any state without using variables (and the wildcard character would preferably not be assigned a single value like variables are, so a state-1 cell surrounded by cells of all different states could use "1,*,*,*,*,*,*,*,*,0" whereas "1,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,0" wouldn't work)